Click on the play button to listen to report.

John McCreedy is the Pres. and CEO of Amalgamated Sugar Company certainly has reason to endorse genetically modified sugarbeet seed given that they make sugar beets more resistant to pesticides and make sugar beets sugar content higher thus improving factory efficiency. The Idaho Statesman reports that Amalgamated buys every sugar beet grown in Idaho and having just finished processing the 2016 crop, the yield was a record 2.3 4 billion pounds of sugar. Idaho growers harvested 7.2 million tons of sugar beets last year which is also a record.

Idaho Farm Bureau reporter and blogger Jake Putnam has thoughts on Idaho's sugar beets: “Sugar beets are Idaho's best kept secret. When all other segments of egg production were a little bit off, beats did really well and it's because our growers are the best in the world. We do have to fix the trade relationship with Mexico on sugar however.”